Werewolf CCLXII: Trouble at Trinity

[Deleted user]

Or did you meant he apprentice, because that could be grabbed by goodies too.

I meant the apprentice as they were already a goodie, so while yes HistoryDude or aedan scanning agatha would claim her and prevent the baddies from getting her, the sorcerer scanning an unclaimed apprentice is basically as good for the baddies as hitting a cursed. Now it can also be a big boon to the goodies, but in a game this small one more baddie can be back breaking as is shown by the fact that with Agatha being known to you the game was lost. Take Euro's PL away and that's still mostly true as you could have lynched EURO, hunted anyone but me, Agatha, and historydude, and scanned Agatha and still hit parity.

 

[Deleted user]

Also, a liar can't do the superscan AND shoot somebody, as you can't do two actions on the same night and vH and hunter count as the same claim. So it's either superscan or a shot.

I've definitely had some GMs allow me to do multiple actions on the same night or tell me that I would be able to when I was considering that as an option.

Also, there was still some RP going on when I joined Wagon. Sure, not full RP where no one dropped character, but some tongue in cheek playing of a character here and there, where it wasn't that uncommon to have someone putting a silly paragraph that most people would skim as it had little analysis.

I just don't think it's a good trait. In the right hands you can break a game in half with it, making sure your side always has the coverage it needs. In other hands it sits there unused because they won't take the time to set up the lies.

 

[Wagonlitz]

I meant the apprentice as they were already a goodie, so while yes HistoryDude or aedan scanning agatha would claim her and prevent the baddies from getting her, the sorcerer scanning an unclaimed apprentice is basically as good for the baddies as hitting a cursed. Now it can also be a big boon to the goodies, but in a game this small one more baddie can be back breaking as is shown by the fact that with Agatha being known to you the game was lost. Take Euro's PL away and that's still mostly true as you could have lynched EURO, hunted anyone but me, Agatha, and historydude, and scanned Agatha and still hit parity.

Btw, just remembered: You actually were teh brutal target until you decided to use your cloak. So you did correctly gauge what Euro was trying to do.

I've definitely had some GMs allow me to do multiple actions on the same night or tell me that I would be able to when I was considering that as an option.

Oh right. Yeah, some GMs will allow multiple actions. Pretty sure most don't. In any case, it varies GM to GM, so whether you get both super scan and shot is up in the air.

Also, there was still some RP going on when I joined Wagon. Sure, not full RP where no one dropped character, but some tongue in cheek playing of a character here and there, where it wasn't that uncommon to have someone putting a silly paragraph that most people would skim as it had little analysis.

Johho and other old hands did. Dn't think any newer player did, but perhaps I forgot.
But yeah, it can be easier to hide in RP posts.

I just don't think it's a good trait. In the right hands you can break a game in half with it, making sure your side always has the coverage it needs. In other hands it sits there unused because they won't take the time to set up the lies.

True. It does require active players, and if the liar is inactive it can really harm.
As we actually saw this game. Had Euro been more active then the liar would have been properly utilised from teh start, instead of only getting in two lies. A brief one day 1 and then the day 3 one.

 

[Culann]

Thanks for hosting @Ironhide G1!

 

[beartjah]

The mass claiming traits/roles is just as bad, yes. And that honsetly shouldn't be allowed too. Or, well, if you can claim multipel traits/roles, possibly all, in a conceiled way then sure, go for it. But doing it in a boorish way shiuldn't be allowed.

But where do we draw the line at what counts as 'mass claiming'? One might even argue that euro's use of it on the last day of this game is already getting close to claiming half the trait-list, which isn't really what the PL was supposed to be about. Trying to ban mass claiming is going to run into debates about where exactly the line is.

PLs can be strong, yes, but indeed do require capable players. And hence can be hard to balance. I don't think they are too strong game mechanically, though, and definitely shuld still be used.
Could do the variant where you only can make three lies per game, though. That would limit things a bit. Could possibly allow multiple claims of the same role/trait, then, albeit that would be risky as it could lead to three hunter shots...

A trait should generally be balanced on the assumption that people do actually use it. And PL is ludicrously powerful if played to its fullest extend: it allows to user to flexibly pick and choose from the entire trait-list to use whatever trait happens to most useful for the situation, and the PL can do this repeatedly. Even when limited to just one single use throughout the entire game, it is very powerful if you can use the right trait at the right time.

Why would you not have accepted Johho's OEO claim? IIRC the picture was of the character Johho was RPing as, and at least it was part of an RP post. So it actually was teh very definition of how liar was meant to be used.

To me, posting a picture like that is hinting at a trait, not actually claiming the trait. Which is part of the problem with PL as I see it: far too dependent on subjective GM calls to make it work.

As for how subtle claims shuld be, then that should always be up to the GM. There is no fixed answer for it, which also is why you should send your claim to the GM immediately you made it, such that the GM can accept or reject. Then you can try again, if it's rejected. Obviosly that requires teh GM actually beong online throughout the day, but a lot of stuff requires that to work properly.

Having the 'permitted subtelty' depend on the GM is a bad idea: you're going to end up in a situation where the PL cannot really know in advance whether their claim will be accepted by the GM, unless the claim is very explicit/obvious.

And GMs really should reward ingenuity, so if you make something ingenious then it should be rewarded. Obviously there is a limit, but usually if it can be read the way that's meant, it should be accepted.
Which is why I accepted the negative Nancy claim, despite how ti could be argued that negative Nancy would be a negation of Nancy, so claimng not to be priest, and hence a claim for priest would have needed to be that MC was not being a negative Nancy. But it's also possible to say that somebody is being a negative person, without meaning that they aren't a person, but rather that they have a pessimistic mood. So givne it can be read as being a pessimistic priest, then I accepted it.
And that's how I think GMs should handle lies. If it can be read the way the liar intends by a man on the Clapham omnibus, then it should be accepted.
Now, can it be so subtle the other players never notice it? For sure. But that's also part of it: Being able to make lies which never are detected. And detecting a good lie as an opposing player is meant to be an achievement.

So I really don't think subtleness is a real issue. As long as GMs look at what's being claimed and whether a man on the Clapham omnibus could read it that way.
Requiring I am x just gimps the trait.

Like, an example of how you might claim seer would be that as part of some point you state that you can spot whether somebody [likely somebody named] is a wolf or not. Or something similar. That would be clearly seer, as seer can spot whether somebody is wolf or not.

The problem is that, at some point, the claims get so subtle that you're not even really claiming the trait anymore. You need to draw a line somewhere and say 'this isn't actually claiming the trait', and you can't really call on common sense here because different people will draw that line at different places.

And remember that the PL is heavily incentivised to push the limits of what is still counts as a trait-claim: that's how you maximise the power of the trait. So it is inevitable that you're going to end up with some not-really-trait-claims that some people would consider as barely acceptable and other people would view as across the line. F.e. that picture to claim oeo.
And with how much the PL trait-usage can affect the game, you're at risk is having the game decided by the GMs value-judgements rather than player skill. With a heated debate afterwards about what the right call would've been, and people feeling robbed by the GM instead of outplayed by the other side. I think we've just seen how bad such situations are for peoples enjoyment of the game.

I don't think that the lie detector necessarily would be a good trait. Could possibly work, but it really needs to be int eh hands of somebody capable too. Unless very obvious claims are made, in which case the lie detector trait would essentially be useless against capable liars and be a huge liability for less capable ones, until the lie detector wielder dies. So that'd make it even more luck based, which I think is bad.

The idea is mostly to ensure that you don't get PLs that just drop the mask entirely and are very open about being PL, by ensuring that any PL that does so just gets killed on the spot for free without needing to spend a lynch/hunt.
It also adds some actual consequences for a poorly disguised lie. As it stands right now, I don't believe I've ever really seen a PL get in trouble if someone spotted the lies.

 

[beartjah]

I was cursed?
That's honestly stupid. Like, a cursed cultist is as, if not more, stupid as the brutal van Helsing.
A situation like when Tonka and I were lovers and I had to hunt aedan aside, i.e. a situation that never should happen, then woloves never ever would even remotely consider hunting their own cultists. It just makes no sense. And as you can't scan for cultist, it'd be unknown that the cultist was cursed...

What was teh thoguht behind the cursed cultist?

I could see a cursed cultist be a thing if the cultist starts off unattached, as a way of reducing the impact of the wolves accidentally hitting an unattached baddie, but that doesn't seem to have been the case here? That said, I don't see any real way in which a cursed cultist in a one-pack game can lead to weird scenarios, since you won't be hunting your own cultist anyway.

There's this thing called convention. If the way you interpret the rules deviates from convention then you really should note that in the rules, as well as be clear about it in role PMs if applicable. Like, if you don't accept backups or standing orders then you really should make that crystal clear up front.
That's what's at teh crux of this. Convention is for alderman to be activated as part of the PM votes. As such we expected it to work the way it conventinally does.
And there have been cases in the past of alderman only firing if various stuff happened during hte PM voting phase of deadline.
Now, an argument can be made for alderman only effecting what's openly known at deadline. But then it should be made crystal clear in the rules and ideally also told to players with alderman at game start.

That's kind of the problem with convention: different people can have different ideas about what the convention actually is. It seems that Ironhide thought that 'instant activation' is the conventional way of doing things, and wasn't aware that there even was a different interpretation of the rules. So for them, there was no reason to explicitly say we're using this version of the alderman trait. This kind of thing is always going to happen every once in a while, unless we create a massive ruleset that covers every tiny detail and weird edge-case, and I don't think anyone feels like going through the herculean effort to do that.

Same thing with the fuss around conditional orders: by my understanding, conditionals are only allowed to be conditional on the final at-deadline votecount, as a way to allow people that aren't online at deadline to avoid scanning the lynched person or stuff like that. Most rulesets do no address the matter of what conditional orders are allowed at all. The only ruleset that even addresses the issue at all (by capibara) is very explicit in saying that you aren't allowed to make your orders conditional on trait-actions that are earlier in the night/day trait-order.
By that rule, the conditional order we saw this game wouldn't be allowed/trigger, because euro's 'activate alderman if it saves me' isn't allowed to be conditional on arkasas activating plotter. Besides, if you put in some effort you could probably come up with some way to create a circle of mutually activating/de-activating plotter votes that cannot be resolved, so allowing alderman/plotter activations conditional on other alderman/plotter activations is bound to create an unresolvable disaster at some point.
Though then I suppose you could still set a conditional order whose activation is based on an adjusted at-deadline votecount, where euro activates regardless of whether arkasas actually changed his vote. But this would the kind of thing that needs to be added explicitly, otherwise you're giving the GM a headache of having to interpret what someone intended with their conditions.

 

[Team Wombat]

@Wagonlitz MAW started out cursed. You robbed him, taking his cursed trait.

 

[Wagonlitz]

But where do we draw the line at what counts as 'mass claiming'? One might even argue that euro's use of it on the last day of this game is already getting close to claiming half the trait-list, which isn't really what the PL was supposed to be about. Trying to ban mass claiming is going to run into debates about where exactly the line is.

Euros claiming was mass claiming.
Albeit, it also was a special case that I don't consider just as bad: Namely he was outed. As an outed baddie you are supposed to huff and puff and doing stuff like: Brutal last person voting me, is an honoured tradition for an outed wolf. Whether they're brutal or not. Making claims of taking revenge, etc. when outed should be allowed. And that includes claiming having a cloak, claiming brutal, hunter, whatever. Bascisly trying to unsettle the JL. So I think that is a special case that should be allowed.

Plus, if you are actually a PL being lynched you can use brutal and that's it. So all the rest is fluff anyway.

But generally then I'd say mass claiming is without attempt to hide rhe claims to claim more than one trait/role.

A trait should generally be balanced on the assumption that people do actually use it. And PL is ludicrously powerful if played to its fullest extend: it allows to user to flexibly pick and choose from the entire trait-list to use whatever trait happens to most useful for the situation, and the PL can do this repeatedly. Even when limited to just one single use throughout the entire game, it is very powerful if you can use the right trait at the right time.

No traits are balanced by that argument, though. Like, we have in rhe past seen e.g. Yakman as a hunter goodie shoot another goodie solely on a hunch.
And there's been major scanners using their role non optimally too.

To me, posting a picture like that is hinting at a trait, not actually claiming the trait. Which is part of the problem with PL as I see it: far too dependent on subjective GM calls to make it work.

Keep in mind this was back when role-playing still did happen at times, and Johho often if not always had some kind of role playing. The image was part of it. Might even have been he said he was going to sleep, but I can't recall. It's been too long and not sure how to even remotely efficiently search for the post.

Having the 'permitted subtelty' depend on the GM is a bad idea: you're going to end up in a situation where the PL cannot really know in advance whether their claim will be accepted by the GM, unless the claim is very explicit/obvious.

A lot of stuff already is up to GM discretion, though. So having one more thing won't necessarily be top bad.
As long as the GM is around several times during the day you can just try again.
And not knowing whether your claim is accepted or not is part of making lies.

The problem is that, at some point, the claims get so subtle that you're not even really claiming the trait anymore. You need to draw a line somewhere and say 'this isn't actually claiming the trait', and you can't really call on common sense here because different people will draw that line at different places.

And remember that the PL is heavily incentivised to push the limits of what is still counts as a trait-claim: that's how you maximise the power of the trait. So it is inevitable that you're going to end up with some not-really-trait-claims that some people would consider as barely acceptable and other people would view as across the line. F.e. that picture to claim oeo.
And with how much the PL trait-usage can affect the game, you're at risk is having the game decided by the GMs value-judgements rather than player skill. With a heated debate afterwards about what the right call would've been, and people feeling robbed by the GM instead of outplayed by the other side. I think we've just seen how bad such situations are for peoples enjoyment of the game.

A lie would need to have some kind of reference to the trait.
Yes, people might try and min max it, but then risk it not being accepted. I don't think it really leaves the game to GM rulings, as long as the GM is around during the day to say whether a claim is allowed or not.

A GM could always give some general guidelines if possible in the PL trait description with regard to how they'd administer lies, albeit that might not be the best idea thinking aboht it, as its hard to think of all contingencies.

The idea is mostly to ensure that you don't get PLs that just drop the mask entirely and are very open about being PL, by ensuring that any PL that does so just gets killed on the spot for free without needing to spend a lynch/hunt.
It also adds some actual consequences for a poorly disguised lie. As it stands right now, I don't believe I've ever really seen a PL get in trouble if someone spotted the lies.

The problem is if the lie detector already is dead.
That's why I don't think it necessarily is a good trait.
If you did something like that, then perhaps rather have it be a thing everybody can use, but if you're wrong you die instead. That probably would be a better way to do it, as then you won't end up in situations where PLs get blatant the second the lie detector is dead.

could see a cursed cultist be a thing if the cultist starts off unattached

True, and I did almost mention that, but didn't want to get too complex.

That's kind of the problem with convention: different people can have different ideas about what the convention actually is. It seems that Ironhide thought that 'instant activation' is the conventional way of doing things, and wasn't aware that there even was a different interpretation of the rules. So for them, there was no reason to explicitly say we're using this version of the alderman trait. This kind of thing is always going to happen every once in a while, unless we create a massive ruleset that covers every tiny detail and weird edge-case, and I don't think anyone feels like going through the herculean effort to do that.

True that the rules can't account for all.
When situations like these come up then it should be noted then, going forward which variant is used.

Besides, if you put in some effort you could probably come up with some way to create a circle of mutually activating/de-activating plotter votes that cannot be resolved, so allowing alderman/plotter activations conditional on other alderman/plotter activations is bound to create an unresolvable disaster at some point.

True.

@Wagonlitz MAW started out cursed. You robbed him, taking his cursed trait.

Just typical.
We'd have won day 2 then, as parity would have hit just after the lynch. Would have been even easier to have hit parity day 1 then, btw, as then we'd only have needed three kills instead of 5.

Pretty sure no game, neither big nor lite, ever has ended day 1.
And think this might be the fastest big win ever as iirc the Lemeards was the previously fastest and ended on day 4. But I could be wrong om that.
It is one of the fastest ever, at least, if not the fastest.



A shame I was talked out of using the robber night 0. Not that Deo had much, but more that then we'd have turned Maw.

 

[Deleted user]

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